Deborah Lipp

Frankenstein Unbound (1990) 6/10
In the 24th Century, a scientist (John Hurt) invents a weapon with the unfortunate side-effect of creating rips in the space-time continuum. Falling through one such rip, he lands in the 19th Century, where he meets Victor von Frankenstein (Raul Julia), his monster, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (the future Mary Shelley—Bridget Fonda). Directed by cheese-master Roger Corman.

This is the sort of movie that is very hard to review. An objective rating is impossible, as one’s love of bad camp, high corn, and general silly antics must come into play. The movie combines some extremely pseudo-intellectual philosophizing with enthusiastically gruesome violence. The sex is, sadly, underemphasized in favor of the gore and Deep Meaning.

Personally, I prefer my cheesy movies with nipples.

None of the philosophizing makes all that much sense. Hurt makes a maddeningly unscientific scientist. He doesn’t care a damn bit about the repercussions of time travel, and never notices that every other scientist who has ever discussed the subject has been concerned with changing the future by introducing modern technology into the past. His character, Dr. Buchanan, is simply delighted to show anyone who’ll look his cool car, his cool watch, and even a printout of the book Mary Shelley has not yet finished. Having created a horrific phenomenon with his laser weapon, he has no apparent compunctions about using it again, even as it becomes more and more destructive to reality. All this while acknowledging that he, too, is a Frankenstein, having created his own monster. Maybe the point is that mad scientists love their monsters. Despite all the verbal rumination, they never got to that idea, but Raul Julia expresses it indirectly in a mad, look-at-my-crazy-eyes sort of way. Julia was cool.

Dr. Buchanan is incurious about the past, he just wants to have fun in it. He thinks it’s cool to meet people he’s read about, and he thinks he can save people from their errors (ignoring, again, the time paradox) simply by saying, quite forcefully, that he’s right. It’s amusing how John Hurt is so emphatically not an action hero. In scenes where he’s in a hurry, where Bruce or Arnie or Clint or Pierce would race like the wind, Hurt sort of gently trots, at a pace just enough above walking to convey he is concerned.

Buchanan’s characterization is problematic, the stupid enormous plot holes considerably less so. One doesn’t watch a movie like this because it is smart. Dumb would be great if the hero were not so much a dork.

But hey, Frankenstein Unbound has fun moments. You have to admire a movie that has the future Mary Shelley say “Byron and Shelley preach free love. I practice it” before getting the hero into bed. And my heavens he looks so happy afterwards! That is one fine post-coital moment. And any movie in which a monster rips off his own arm in order to beat someone with it has got to earn points for enthusiasm. Way to go! I don’t usually find “funny” gore funny, but come on, that’s a riot!